continuing dialogue.

Wiesel urges his readers not to draw hasty or final conclusions; rather his emphasis is on exploration and inquiry. It might be objected that such an outlook tends to encourage indecision and even indifference. One of Wiesel’s most significant contributions, however, runs in precisely the opposite direction. His perspective on understanding and on morality is of one piece. Thus, his writings emphasize that dialogue leads not to indecision but to an informed decisiveness. Tentativeness becomes protest when unjustified conviction asserts itself. Openness results not in indifference but in the loyalty of which friendship is made and on which it depends.

“[P]assivity and indifference and neutrality,” adds Wiesel, “always favor the killer, not the victim.” He will never fully understand the world’s killers. To do so would be to legitimize them by showing that they were part of a perfectly rational scheme. Although for very different reasons, he will not fully understand their victims, either; the victims’ silent screams call into question every account of their dying that presents itself as a final solution. Yet Wiesel insists that understanding should be no less elusive where indifference prevails. Too often, indifference exists among those who could make a difference, as it can characterize those who stand between killers and victims but aid the former against the latter by doing too little, too late.

Night

First published: Un di Velt hot geshvign, 1956; La Nuit, 1958 (English translation, 1960)

Type of work: Memoir

Wiesel describes his teenage experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where he endured the Holocaust in 1944 and 1945.

At the beginning of Night, Wiesel introduces someone he met toward the end of 1941. His name was Moshe, and he became one of the boy’s teachers. They discussed religious topics, and one day they talked about prayer. Wiesel asked Moshe why he prayed, and his teacher replied that he prayed for strength to ask God the right questions. Later, the Hungarian police deported Moshe from Sighet, Wiesel’s hometown, because he was a foreigner. His destination was Poland and death at the hands of the Germans, but somehow Moshe escaped and found his way back to Sighet. The Jews of Sighet did not believe his tale of destruction.

Although the Holocaust was raging all around them, the Hungarian Jews were not decimated until 1944. Their lives began to change drastically, however, once the Germans occupied Hungary that March. In a matter of days, Sighet’s Jews had to deal with quarantines, expropriations of their property, and the yellow stars that targeted them. Then they were ghettoized and deported. Jammed into train cars, destination unknown, the Jews of Sighet—Elie Wiesel, his little sister, Tzipora, and their parents among them—eventually crossed the Polish frontier and arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Emerging from their train-car prisons into midnight air fouled by burning flesh, the Jews of Sighet were separated by the secret police: men to the left, women to the right. Wiesel lost sight of his mother and little sister, not fully aware that the parting was forever. Father and son stuck together. Spared the fate of Wiesel’s mother and sister, they were not “selected” for the gas chambers but for slave labor instead. From late May, 1944, until mid-January, 1945, Wiesel and his father endured Auschwitz’s brutal regimen. As the Red Army approached the camp, the two were evacuated to Germany. Severely weakened by the death march to Buchenwald, Wiesel’s father perished there, but the son was liberated on April 11, 1945.

Night covers in detail these events, but it is much more than a chronological narrative. The power of this memoir emerges especially from the anguished questions that Wiesel’s Holocaust experiences will not put to rest. Before he entered Auschwitz, Wiesel “believed profoundly.” Yet on that fateful night, and in the days that followed, his world changed forever. Optimism about humankind, trust in the world, confidence in God—Auschwitz radically threatened, if it did not destroy, so many reasons for hope.

This point is illustrated especially well by one of the book’s most unforgettable moments. Wiesel describes the hanging of three Auschwitz prisoners—one of them a child. As the prisoners watched the child die, Wiesel heard a man asking: “For God’s sake, where is God?” Wiesel writes that “from within me. I heard a voice answer: ’Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.’”

Death’s reign in the Kingdom of Night was so pervasive that Wiesel ends Night by reporting that a corpse stared back at him when he saw his own reflection in a mirror for the first time after liberation. Yet Night does not give death—God’s or humanity’s—the last word. By breaking silence, by telling a story that is full of reasons for despair, Wiesel protests against the wasting of life and testifies for the mending of the world by humankind and God alike.

The Accident

First published: Le Jour, 1961 (English translation, 1962)

Type of work: Novel

Eliezer, a young Holocaust survivor, wrestles with his past in a struggle to decide whether life is worth living.

The Accident is the third part of a trilogy that begins with Night. Originally titled Le Jour (the day), it comes after L’Aube (1960; Dawn, 1961), a novel in which Wiesel explores the ambiguous legacy of Night by describing how Elisha, another young Holocaust survivor, confronts the uneasy responsibility of killing to help establish a post-Holocaust homeland for Jews in Israel. The setting for The Accident is very different, but this novel also probes Holocaust survival and finds its meaning unsettled and unsettling. Both Night and Dawn reveal that the swords of politics and history cut many ways. Once one has experienced that kind of destruction, The Accident asks whether life is worth living at all.

His present and future overwhelmed by what he has witnessed in the past, Eliezer doubts that he can endure his Holocaust survival. The world will not be changed, it seems, and the dead cannot be brought back to life. Nevertheless, they haunt the living too much, creating feelings of guilt, frustration, anger, and rebellion that make joy and happiness all but impossible. In spite of the fact that he has friends and even a woman who loves him, the young man’s life is “the tragic fate of those who came back, left over, living-dead.” Thus, not only because he feels that “I am my past,” but also because he knows that his inability to move beyond makes others suffer, Eliezer senses that life will force him to lie in ways that he has neither the desire nor the strength to sustain.

Not feeling well, exhausted by the heat and a reporting job that seems of no consequence, Eliezer still manages to keep his date with Kathleen. They decide on a film, The Brothers Karamazov. Then, crossing a busy New York street, the young man is struck and dragged by a car: Le Jour, rendered in English, becomes The Accident. “On the fifth day I at last regained consciousness,” Eliezer reports. “I felt alone, abandoned. . . . That I was still alive had left me indifferent, or nearly so.”

Hope dawns in the “nearly so.” Undeniably, the discovery that he can still speak sparks a choice for life, however faint, that cannot be hidden. Then, nurtured by friends, continuing under the care of a doctor who takes death as his personal enemy, life returns to be chosen again, although not without memory of the Holocaust’s ashes. Eliezer is alive in the hospital at the end of The Accident, and the reader does not know entirely what will become of him. This much, however, is clear: He has decided to tell his story, to share it with others, and in that action a rejection of death and an affirmation of life can be found.

In a 1985 preface to this novel, Wiesel acknowledged that The Accident’s protagonist “has lived through some of my experiences, but I have not lived through his.” To that remark Wiesel added a suggestion: “[I]n the end, all works of literature, even despairing ones, constitute an appeal to life.” Thus, it is also noteworthy that this novel is dedicated to Paul Braunstein, the skilled physician who restored Wiesel’s health after the accident that nearly took the life that Wiesel finds so important.

A Beggar in Jerusalem

First published: Le Mendiant de Jérusalem, 1968 (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Novel

This novel, one of Wiesel’s most penetrating, philosophical, and mystical, intermingles the joy of victory with the anguish of Holocaust-related recollection and protest about the injustice of the past, which lingers on.

The year is 1967. The Six-Day War has Israel under threat, but the Jews win. The ancient western temple wall in Jerusalem is recovered. As David, the novel’s narrator, tells the story of this struggle, the Jewish triumph reverberates with recollections and questions whose Holocaust-related themes shadow the victory.

A beggar has been in the struggle. He has seen Jerusalem secured by Israeli troops, but the result does not add up to satisfaction, for the beggar cannot forget the prices paid—particularly the loss of his friend, Katriel, and the repeated “destructions of Jerusalem elsewhere than in Jerusalem.” In joy and sadness, the beggar finds companionship with kindred spirits who gather at the Wall. They are waiting—some for understanding, some for lost friends, and all in their own ways for God. They also swap stories.

The beggar remembers, for example, Jews being marched into a forest. It is hot. Most of the men, women, and children are permitted to sit on the grass while a few dig pits. The job completed, an officer drives up and finds everything in order. He proposes that the action be carried out in family units and lets the people talk things over. Some of the young try to resist, but they are no match for their German guards. The killing is delayed only for a moment. It goes on for hours, interrupted twice. Tevye the Tailor has ten children. It takes time to line them up along the grave. There is also a young man who sings. Apparently the shooting cannot silence him, even though he has no wish to be a lone survivor, a madman whose tale neither can be fully told nor fully heard and believed.

Is this story literally true? Yes and no. Such scenes were not uncommon during the Holocaust, when shooting squadrons murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews. Yet Wiesel’s primary concern is to recover the speech and silence that such episodes are likely to have contained; it is in this domain that the power of his characters and authorship resides. Thus, as the killers do their work, the novel allows its reader to hear a Jewish teacher talking to his disciples. For reasons that this man does not know, God, he says, “demands our lives in sacrifice.” Very well, they shall accept the inevitable in strength, without asking for mercy that will not be. However, the teacher adds, “Know too that the God of Israel is today violating the Law of Israel. The Torah prohibits killing the cow and her calf on the same day; yet this law, which we have faithfully observed, does not apply to us. See that what is granted to animals is refused to the children of Israel.”

Another scene: Katriel is married to Malka, an orphan who wants no children for fear of nourishing death. Malka, however, is persuaded by Katriel’s father, and Sasha is born. The boy is a delight, but “then came the day when the parents returned home alone and defeated.” Katriel and Malka endured, although at times memory could not be tamed. Once while studying Talmud with his father, Katriel had enough: “We love You, God, we fear You, we crown You, we cling to You in spite of You, yet forgive me if I tell you my innermost thoughts, forgive me for telling You that You are cheating! . . . You bless us, and You take back Your blessing. Why are You doing all this, to prove what?” Not long after, Katriel kissed Malka goodbye, and went off to fight for Israel. Malka became an orphan again.

A Beggar in Jerusalem ends with David, the narrator, “still here on this haunted square, in this city where nothing is lost and nothing dispersed.” However, he knows that he will be moving on, homeward with Malka. There is victory in this novel, a small measure of victory. Its staggering cost, however, is likely to leave Wiesel’s readers where they usually find themselves: with more questions than answers and yet more determined to make life as good as it can be.

The Oath

First published: Le Serment de Kolvillàg, 1973 (English translation, 1973)

Type of work: Novel

Azriel, yet another of Wiesel’s lone survivors of catastrophe, is past-bound in this novel.

In The Oath, Azriel’s home has been destroyed in a pre-Holocaust pogrom produced by an anti-Semitic rumor: It claims that the Jews of Kolvillàg have killed a Christian boy in an act of ritual murder. Moshe, eccentric saint of the Jewish community, offers himself as guilty of the nonexistent crime. However, hate will not be satisfied so easily, and the Jews prepare. Abandoned by their Gentile friends, a few arm themselves. Some celebrate life in the darkness. Most follow age-old wisdom: They rally strength quietly to wait and endure.

The captive Moshe is allowed to speak to his people. By neither word nor deed has Jewish example through the centuries been sufficient to alter inhumanity, nor to persuade God to intervene against senseless killing. So Moshe persuades his people to try a different strategy, to accept an oath of silence. No survivor will reveal anything of what is about to befall Kolvillàg. Only the young Azriel survives. He becomes a wanderer, torn between speech and silence, true to his promise.

Years later, Azriel meets a young man who wishes he were dead. This young person is driven to despair because he is the child of Holocaust survivors. He has no past to match that of his parents, and that of his parents is beyond him. They cannot see him for what he is because they see others—now lost—in him. He cannot locate himself within his family or within the tradition of his people. Azriel decides to intervene, but how to make the young man choose life is the question. Azriel answers by breaking his oath. He tells his tale-that-cannot-be-told, hoping to instill rebellion, responsibility in the place of emptiness, life to counter death.

“Could I have been spared in Kolvillàg so I could help a stranger?” Azriel’s question remains without closure, at least without closure that is simply satisfying. The answer of friendship remains as well: “By allowing me to enter his life,” the young man says of Azriel, “he gave meaning to mine.” Again and again in Wiesel’s writings, the importance of friendship shines through. It does not put Azriel’s questions to rest entirely, but friendship, as The Oath testifies, may make life very much worth living.